yaniotis13

I have a question about pacman for the 5200 maybe you can answer. I was wondering if you can make pacman change direction in the game by a slight movement in any direction of the analog stick or do you have to push it all the way to the end of the direction you choose to move him in.

I grew up in the nintendo/sega genesis age so any kind of joystick will automatically make my performance in the game a little worse than if i have a d-pad. I have never used a 5200 controller personally, I am going on the hundreds of reviews of it on the internet. However you are starting to sway me. Then again when I was planning on buying my 7800 I kept saying eh how bad could the joysticks be? People usually exaggerate... But wow they are horrendous. I guess that's why I'm so skeptical about the 5200 controllers.

I agree 100% with your statements about Pac-Man and ET however I don't see how somebody could not have a problem with the Atari 5200 controllers. Besides the fact that they are destined to break extremely quickly for controller standards, the non self centering analog with its extremely wide range of motion made many games impossible to play. If the 5200 had the same amount of controller options as the 2600 did then we wouldn't have looked back at the 5200 controllers as such a disaster. We would be able to use them for the games they were meant to be played with like Pole Position and we could use a more traditional 2600 style joystick for games like Pac-Man. It's a real shame because the 5200 had incredible graphics for its time, great sound, as well as built in voice capabilities. It also had every important arcade game of its time. It had the potential to accomplish great things for atari and the video game industry as a whole. Especially if it wasn't so expensive when it came out.

Is the 7800 joypad a really tight fit for anyone else? I almost pulled apart the console while trying to pull it out and it took all my strength to plug it in all the way. Does anybody else have this problem?